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1950s Calendar Girls: The original victims of Photoshop?
05.14.2012
02:22 pm
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Source photos of pin-up girls next to their painted “after” image.

What caught my attention about these side-by-side comparisons is how they expose the 1950/60s version of photoshopping. Dig how painter Gil Elvgren, a noted American pin-up master, shaved the curves from real woman’s bodies to “improve” upon them, even back then!

Look at those itty-bitty waists and the exaggerated curvature of the feet! All of this crap has been around much longer than we’ve suspected!

And here I thought “duckface” was a MySpace phenomenon? Alas I’m proven wrong—apparently duckface was alive and well in the 1950s.

Elvgren produced many of his pin-up paintings for Brown & Bigelow, the same company who also produced Norman Rockwell’s decidedly more wholesome Boy Scouts calendars.
 

 

 

 

 
Via Retronaut

Posted by Tara McGinley
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05.14.2012
02:22 pm
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Thanks, Maurice: Artists Pay Tribute to Maurice Sendak
05.14.2012
11:45 am
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A wonderful tribute in the New York Times yesterday where artists were asked to contribute original works of art in memory of Maurice Sendak.

The piece pictured above was done by Gary Taxali. And how fitting it is. Just wonderful.

See the rest of the slide show, which includes art works by Art Spiegelman, Tomi Ungerer, Geoff McFetridge, Bob Staake, Marc Rosenthal and Jon Klassen in The New Times Sunday Review section.

Via Laughing Squid

 

Posted by Tara McGinley
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05.14.2012
11:45 am
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David Bowie’s 1982 film “Bertolt Brecht’s Baal”
05.12.2012
06:51 pm
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My co-conspirator here at DM Paul Gallagher covered this last year, but I found a nice new high quality upload of the video in full and thought I should update the article and share it with you all once again. I’m sure our new readers will appreciate it.

Here is David Bowie in the BBC production of Brecht’s play Baal, from 1982. It was directed by Alan Clarke, the talent behind such controversial TV dramas as Scum with a young Ray Winstone, Made in Britain, with Tim Roth, and Elephant.

Baal was Brecht’s first full-length play, written in 1918, and it tells the story of a traveling musician / poet, who seduces and destroys with callous indifference.

Bowie is excellent as Baal and the five songs he sings in this production were co-produced with Tony Visconti, and later released as the EP David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht’s Baal.
 

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.12.2012
06:51 pm
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‘The Jodorowsky Constellation’: A lively look at a modern magician
05.12.2012
04:03 pm
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“Madwoman of the Sacred Heart.” Graphic novel by by Moebius and Jodorowsky.

On the heels of sharing The Holy Mountain with DM readers, I thought an Alejandro Jodorowsky documentary might be timely and this is a good one.

In 1994 French film maker Louis Mouchet interviewed Jodorowsky and a bunch of his friends and collaborators, including director Fernando Arrabal, Peter Gabriel, Marcel Marcea and artist Moebius.

Jodorowsky is witty and wise as he discusses his masterpieces El Topo and The Holy Mountain, his failed Dune project, the Tarot, his role as a teacher and reluctant new age guru. He’s kind of like Freud on psychotropics.

I hope you enjoy this fascinating look into the mind of a modern magician and trickster who is constantly evolving and adapting to new technologies and formulating new philosophies. 

“As soon as I define myself I’m dead.” ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky.

 


Alejandro Jodorowsky- Constellation 1/4 by zindabad7
 
Parts two, three and four here.

Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.12.2012
04:03 pm
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Alejandro Jodorowky’s ‘The Holy Mountain’ in all of its magical glory
05.11.2012
12:21 am
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Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo and The Holy Mountain truly define the meaning of the words “head movie.” Both films have the capacity to alter your consciousness while you’re watching them and long thereafter. Like the afterglow of a deeply profound dream, El Topo has been a part of me, shifting the gears in the soft machine of my brain, since I first saw it in 1971 at a midnight screening in Denver, Colorado when I was 19 years old. It was in every respect a spiritual experience.

Years later, when I saw The Holy Mountain the impact was less transformative than seeing El Topo, but I was still thoroughly blown away by Jodorowsky’s Technicolor alchemy. His celluloid transmission was light years ahead of its time. Made in 1973, the film’s look and attitude seem totally of the moment. Yes, it has its hippy dippy moments and goes soft in places, but overall it’s an amazing piece of film making that in its visual design - sets, costumes, symbols, color palette - is as cutting edge as anything made by contemporary directors like David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Chan Wook-park or Gaspar Noé. The movie is breathtaking. And it looks like it cost 20 times its $750,000 budget. Amazing.


 
If you’ve never seen The Holy Mountain, I suggest you see it on the big screen. Its visual wonders should be allowed to overwhelm and engulf you.

For home viewing, THM has been released in a beautiful Blu-ray transfer that is vast improvement over the fifth-generation bootlegged VHS copies that used to circulate among hardcore fans way back in the days before Jodorowsky’s praises were being sung by Marilyn Manson and Daniel Pinchbeck.

Normally I wouldn’t steer Dangerous Minds’ readers to a YouTube upload of something as visually sumptous as The Holy Mountain, but this happens to be really nice looking. Watch it and you’ll probably want to own it in remastered form, either on DVD or Blu-ray. Consider this as a kind of introduction, a full-length teaser, a first date with someone you’ll eventually marry.

Watch in 720p for a nice hi def image. This version has English dubbing, which is unfortunate but it doesn’t really diminish the overall experience.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.11.2012
12:21 am
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Wild realities and strange mythologies: The visceral beauty of Pieter Hugo’s vision
05.10.2012
05:41 pm
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While we have featured the work of Pieter Hugo here on Dangerous Minds in the past, I thought I’d pull it all together into one piece so that those of you who are not familiar with this amazing artist’s work could experience it now.

There aren’t enough adjectives in my vocabulary to do justice to the photography of Pieter Hugo. “Powerful,” “disturbing,” “visceral,” “empathetic,” “sad,” and “beautiful” are all appropriately descriptive, but the term “a picture is worth a thousand words” has never been truer than in case of this South African’s visual genius. So I’ll let the pictures do the talking after I share a bit of background on Hugo’s work  

In the series “The Hyenas and Other Men,” Hugo documents the Gadawan Kura’ (hyena handlers/guides) who live in the shanty towns of Lagos, Nigeria and make a living by performing on the streets with hyenas that they’ve captured in the wild.
 

 
Hugo describes encountering and working with the hyena handlers:

In Abuja we found them living on the periphery of the city in a shantytown - a group of men, a little girl, three hyenas, four monkeys and a few rock pythons. It turned out that they were a group of itinerant minstrels, performers who used the animals to entertain crowds and sell traditional medicines. The animal handlers were all related to each other and were praising a tradition passed down from generation to generation. I spent eight days traveling with them.

In another series of photographs, Hugo evokes aspects of Nigerian films (Nollywood) in haunting photographs that recreate the surreality of cultures intermingling - Hollywood pop iconography (particularly horror imagery) mashed-up with Africa’s long and deep traditions of myth-making. Sometimes the lie is truer than the truth in these tableaus in which Hugo…

[...] asked a team of actors and assistants to recreate Nollywood myths and symbols as if they were on movie sets, Hugo initiated the creation of a verisimilar reality.”

 

 

 

As if Hugo’s photographs weren’t testimony enough to his extraordinary talents, he directed a very very cool video, Control...

[...] a “darkwave township house” cover of the Joy Division classic “She’s Lost Control” – is the fourth single to be taken from South African producer/DJ Spoek Mathambo’s album, Mshini Wam. The video was shot in Langa, Cape Town was made using a cast made up mainly of kids from the local dance troupe, Happy Feet.”

If you’re as impressed by these photos and video (how could you not be?), check out Hugo’s website where you can feast your eyes on more of his amazing visual gift.
 

 
More of Hugo’s photography after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.10.2012
05:41 pm
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Hypnotic video of skaters’ shadows
05.10.2012
11:20 am
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Lovey skating shadows doing their thing. Soothing music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.
 

 
Via DRLIMA

Posted by Tara McGinley
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05.10.2012
11:20 am
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Dennis Hopper on Art
05.09.2012
06:32 pm
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Dennis Hopper was thirteen when he first sniffed gasoline and watched the clouds turn into clowns and goblins. There was little else to do in Dodge City, where he had been born and raised. Catch lightning bugs, fly his kite, burn newspapers, swim. Hopper was, by his own words, “desperate.” A sensitive child without the stimulation to keep his fevered imagination in check.

Hopper went to movies and watched Abbott and Costello and Errol Flynn. He got home and got high on gasoline fumes and became Abbott and Costello meets Errol Flynn, and wrecked his grandfather’s truck with a baseball bat. It was a hint of what was to come.

Signed to Warner Bros at eighteen, Hopper identified with Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, but found he was expected to conform to the studio’s whims. He was too full of himself, too high on being Brando, Dean and Clift to conform—“I’m a fucking genius, man,” he told anyone who listened. His fuck you attitude saw him picked on and bullied and by old time studio director Henry Hathaway, who had him black-balled from Hollywood.

Over the next few years, Hopper did little work. He picked-up a camera and channeled his talent iby documenting the social and cultural changes happening across America during the 1950s and 1960s. He became a “gallery bum”. Where others went to the beach, Hopper hung around art galleries looking for inspiration.

He met and became friends with the young artists whose works were exhibited—Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Ruscha—and he started to collect—but it wasn’t about the money.

“My idea of collecting is not going and buying bankable names, but buying people that I believe are really contributing something to my artistic life.”

This short film takes us inside the late actor’s home-studio, where he gives a quick tour around his collection of Modern Art works, from Julian Schnabel, Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Ed Ruscha.

Produced and directed by Kimberly M. Wang.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.09.2012
06:32 pm
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This is your brain on ethanol and Diazepam
05.09.2012
05:44 am
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So it turns out that Thomas Kinkade, the Painter Of Light, died of an overdose of Valium and booze. That does go a long way in explaining his spacey take on life.

Kinkade’s autopsy report said that “some of his fingernails still held a residue of green paint, and his toenails were polished a glittery gold.”  Whoah, trippy.

When it comes to booze and benzos, you either learn to navigate the fine line between being high and being dead or you end up being dead. The paradox is that when you’re on the shit you’re in no condition to get a clear read on what condition your condition is in.

Coroner: Valium, Alcohol Killed Painter Kinkade

Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.09.2012
05:44 am
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Acid house: George and Patti Harrison’s psychedelic crash pad
05.08.2012
04:14 pm
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From 1964 to 1970, George Harrison and Patti Harrison (Boyd) lived in a house in Surrey, England that they painted psychedelically with a little help from their friends. The home, known as Kinfauns, was quintessentially hippie with its Indian-influenced interior and a giant trippy mandala mural, a creation of the Dutch art/music collective The Fool, framing the fireplace. Imagine a Haight-Ashbury crash pad for millionaires.

The Harrison’s cosmic hideaway was the setting for Beatle songwriting sessions and the recording of demos for the White Album. It was also a hangout for George’s musician buddies, including Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful, who famously painted a message on the side of the house that read “Mick and Marianne were here & we love you.”

In 1969 Patti and George were arrested in their home for possession of a small chunk of hash. The Drugs Squad chose the day of Paul McCartney’s wedding to Linda Eastman to launch a raid on the Harrison home. The bust resulted in a huge media event - an absurd outcome for an inconsequential amount of smoke. But at least we know where the inspiration for the artwork may have originated.
 

 

 

 
More trippiness after the jump. Watch your step…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.08.2012
04:14 pm
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